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Reasons to choose WooCommerce for your shop

Essentially, WooCommerce by WooThemes is just another free WordPress plugin. However, you would be extremely hard-pressed to find a similar plugin which holds the same level of potential.

Launched in late September 2011, WooCommerce now supports a sizeable slice of the ever-growing ecommerce pie, boasting over 1.6M downloads from across the globe.

The open-source platform provides users with a feature extensive, yet hugely user-friendly experience, making it perfect for ecommerce startups to get a feel for online business in a way which is easy to digest, and doesn’t cost an arm or a leg.

So, let’s take a look at just how WooCommerce fits the bill for budding online merchants.

1. It’s Free

There is no shortage of high quality ecommerce CMS currently on offer, all of which endeavour to help merchants sell online easily and innovatively. Most of the time, the only drawback is that they all come at a price. All except WooCommerce that is.

WooCommerce is completely free to download, right now. Yet, despite being free and open-source, WooCommerce offers extensive features out of the box, whilst also being extremely flexible both by nature, and via the additional of extensions, which I will mention later.

2. Huge Flexibility

Perhaps one of WooCommerce’s biggest benefit to ecommerce newcomers, is that merchants using the platform can exercise a whole lot of flexibility with their products, without having to know too much about the technical side of things.

Products can be categorised, given sale prices, independent attributes, and more. Additionally, WooCommerce stores are capable of selling physical, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate/external products.

3. More Than Ecommerce

WooCommerce doesn’t force users to go beyond their comfort zone when building their online store, yet at the same time, it readily opens the door for more than just ecommerce.

For example, WooCommerce users can build a fully functioning store within a professional website, alongside an integrated blog. All of these dimensions of a business’ online presence are harnessed in one place, and presented together seamlessly, and it’s all thanks to WooCommerce being a WordPress based platform.

With WooCommerce being a WordPress plugin, past users of the platform will benefit from being able to recognise the user-friendly WordPress interface. That kind of familiarity when building an online store could easily save time and confusion, whilst bolstering creativity.

5. Vast Customisation Options

Being free hasn’t made WooCommerce a rigid platform. In fact, there is a lot of room to customise and tweak your online store to a level of uniqueness.

Currently, users can choose from hundreds of WooCommerce enabled themes – once a theme has been selected, you can then get to work on changing pre-set CSS styles, tweaking the code and experimenting with the special features which each theme offers.

6. Professional Yet Simple

Although WooCommerce is a free, user-friendly ecommerce platform, you shouldn’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t a professional online store solution – because that’s exactly what it is.

Built into the platform can be found detailed order tracking and customer engagement tools, which allow merchants to view past and open orders, update delivery statuses, apply discounts and so forth. In fact, tax settings, inventory management, shipping options, coupon codes and pretty much everything else you need for a professional ecommerce setup, is part of WooCommerce, right out of the box.

7. Analytics Made Easy

A core tool used by any website owner, is their analytics tool. Many ecommerce startups may not know how to apply an analytics system to their website, nor will they know what statistics need focused analysis. Thankfully, WooCommerce has such merchants covered.

The built in analytics system makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. Figures like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all neatly presented via graphs, without the user ever having to leave their admin panel. It’s that easy.

8. Apps Galore

As it is, WooCommerce has the ability to help any aspiring online merchant set up, and run his business easily, and professionally. Yet, for those looking for extra functionality, WooCommerce once again doesn’t disappoint.

There are hundreds of extensions available, some of which are free, and some of which require a fee. From these extensions, one can find applications relating to accounting, payment gateways, marketing, reporting and more.

9. Room For Growth

As simple as WooCommerce is as an ecommerce platform, it also allows you to exercise some growth and expansion in terms of how you manage your store, products and customers.

WooCommerce also has various APIs ready to be used for building extensions, along with an extensive documentation library, so that users can get to know how WooCommerce works, inside and out.

10. Because WooThemes

Finally, one of the very best reasons for WooCommerce being perfect for ecommerce startups, is because of its developer, WooThemes.

WooThemes have been around for a while, producing incredible WordPress themes, extensions and plugins, including WooCommerce. They have a wonderful track record of being reliable and exceedingly professional with both their products, and their support system.

So there you have it, ten very good reasons for why you should strongly consider using WooCommerce to propel your first ecommerce project to success.

Article credit: CMS-Critic.com – written by Kaya Ismal

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